USD 501 considers adding rules against transgender discrimination

Sunday

Stephanie Mott will forever carry the difficult memory of being a woman living in a young man’s body while growing up in rural Douglas County.

“I was very closeted about my gender identity, but I was taunted continually because I was effeminate,” the former Steven Mott said of her days at Eudora High School in the early 1970s.

“I was not aware of what it meant to be transgender. But I knew the feelings I had, even though we didn’t have the terminology then. I knew that on the inside, I was female.

“I rode that horse until I was 48 through homelessness and alcoholism.”

Today, living her life happily and productively as a woman in Topeka, Mott is encouraged that the Topeka Unified School District 501 Board of Education is considering policy additions that bar discrimination against students and employees based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

And while there are arguments that protections already exist in policy language barring discrimination based on age, race, color, creed, religion, gender, disability, age, national origin or ancestry, Mott and others counter that specific policy language including sexual orientation and gender identity is necessary to provide full legal protection.

“It not only provides protection, but also sends a clear message that (a school district) will not tolerate discrimination,” said Mott, the Topeka chapter chairwoman of the Kansas Equality Coalition. “When that message is absent, it opens the door for discrimination.

“I know a number of people who suffer discrimination today in high schools across the city,” she added. “I know teachers who are highly afraid that if their sexual orientation is known, they would be subject to discrimination in the workplace, even termination. This is a common fear among people if they are open about their orientation.

“One of the barriers, quite frankly, is that when government agencies — school boards or cities — don’t have policies protecting lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender people, we feel we can’t be who we are, that we have to live closeted lives with identities that don’t match who we really are. And that’s quite horrible.”

The 501 board late Thursday night unanimously approved the first reading of language additions — specifically, the words “sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression” — to district policies dealing with discrimination against students and employees.

Cindy Kelly, the 501 district’s attorney, said the policy additions were recommended by the U.S. Department of Education in an advisory noting that bullying and harassment of students due to sexual orientation or gender identity is rising.

“This will provide an internal mechanism to help kids understand that they have a way to deal with such harassment,” Kelly said.

Board member Peg McCarthy, a clinical psychiatrist, cited surveys showing that 80 percent of gay and lesbian students feel unsafe in their schools, and that more than 60 percent have experienced bullying.

She also noted that transgender students are making their sexual identity known at even earlier ages.

“This issue will become more prominent,” she said in urging 501 to be known as an all-inclusive district.

The Topeka district appears to be among the state’s leaders in addressing the issue — possibly because the state of Kansas hasn’t issued the same kind of advisory submitted by the federal Department of Education.

Paul Getto, the policy specialist for the Kansas Association of School Boards, said his agency isn’t advising member school boards to add new language on the grounds that protections against sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination and harassment already exist in current language required by law.

Getto said the KASB had no formal count of districts that have enacted such provisions, though he believed the number to be small.

But Julie Ford, formally hired Thursday as 501’s new school superintendent, echoed McCarthy’s concern that protecting the safety and rights of transgender students would be a growing issue.

“Truly, it’s more common than you think,” said Ford, who was involved in a previous supervisory capacity in a metropolitan school district where a teacher changed genders.

“The policy change comes first, then you develop regulations on how you’ll follow the policy,” she said. “But there have been things happening lately — a growing number of suicides, for instance — that have caused people to think beyond what our current boundaries are. It’s good that people are talking about this.”

Rick Dean can be reached

at (785) 295-1178

or rick.dean@cjonline.com.

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